Scientific publishing hasn't really changed in over 300 years. By changing papers from a single narrative text (readable by people only) into a rich network of snippets of knowledge ("nano-publications") we would allow computers to become our colleagues instead of just our tools

1. The end of
the scientific paper
as we know it
(in 4 easy steps)
Frank van Harmelen
Paul Groth
VU Amsterdam
And how the Semantic Web
makes it possible

2. Scientific publishing hasn’t changed
in 350 years
• Letter from Christian Huygens (1652)
• Writing to his prof in Mathematics
• Citing (and complaining about)
work of Descartes
• One of 3000 letters by Huygens

3. 2017: Only superficial changes
• Different format & style
• Different medium
(Web, PDF)
• Different speed
(PubMed = 2 papers/min)

4. Section 1: Related work
Section 2: Research question
Section 3: Experimental design
Section 4: Experimental findings
Section 5: Interpretation, conclusions
And our papers still follow
this storyline:
Step 1: Study & interpret literature
Step 2: Formulate hypothesis
Step 3: Design experiment
Step 4: Execute experiment
Step 5: Publish results
This storyline is important,
but only readable by people,
not for machines

5. How to make our papers more usable?
“We only need information extraction
because we first did information burial” (Barend Mons)
“A journal paper
is a state-funeral
for your results”
(Hans Akkermans)

6. Step 1: explicit rhetorical structure
Capture the roles of blocks of text &
make these roles explicit
1 paper = 1 Network of blocks
N papers = 1 Network of blocks
Results Results
Interpretati
ons
Interpretati
ons
Conclusio
ns
Problem
Method
Results
Interpretati
ons
Conclusio
ns
Problem
Method
One paper Another paper

7. Step 2: explicit fine-grained
rhetorical structure
Locate individual knowledge items
and their relationships
Example: Scholonto, ClaiMaker [Buckinham-Shum]
Paper = set of claims
Claim = text – relation – text
Relation = causes, predicts, prevents; addresses, solves
equals, is-similar-to; proofs, supports, challenges
1 paper = 1 fine-grained network of relations
N papers = 1 fine-grained network of relations

9. Step 3: do away with the paper altogether.
• Any fact is a relation between two things (“triple”)
• Count each fact as a nano-publication
• Together, these nano-publications form a
huge very fine-grained network of relations,
a web of knowledge,
a “semantic web”
• Computers as colleagues,
not (only) tools
Just publish the facts

11. Step 4: turning context into a
1st class citizen
• Link to all the stuff that goes on before publication:
– Datasets, workflows
– Open Lab books
– Open peer reviewing
• Link to all the stuff that goes on after publication:
– Websites
– Blogs
– Emails
– Tweets

12. – Give web-addresses to objects (URIs)
– Use the web to link between the objects
– Provide meaning in a form that computers can handle (RDF)
These principles embodied
in already deployed technology
We can build this using
semantic web technology

13. So now we have…
No longer a set of
disconnected monolithic PDFs
A network of facts, reviews,
evidence, opinions, data